This importance is reinforced by Jacqueline Payne, Customer Support Manager at Paperclip Digital, who says ‘Customer service isn’t a buzzword. But too many businesses treat it like it is. As a viable avenue from which to lower customer acquisition costs and cultivate a loyal customer base, chat bots can play a pivotal role in driving business growth.’

“I believe the dreamers come first, and the builders come second. A lot of the dreamers are science fiction authors, they’re artists…They invent these ideas, and they get catalogued as impossible. And we find out later, well, maybe it’s not impossible. Things that seem impossible if we work them the right way for long enough, sometimes for multiple generations, they become possible.”
Respect the conversational UI. The full interaction should take place natively within the app. The goal is to recognize the user's intent and provide the right content with minimum user input. Every question asked should bring the user closer to the answer they want. If you need so much information that you're playing a game of 20 Questions, then switch to a form and deliver the content another way.
Using chatbot builder platforms. You can create a chatbot with the help of services providing all the necessary features and integrations. It can be a good choice for an in-house chatbot serving your team. This option is associated with some disadvantages, including the limited configuration and the dependence on the service. Some popular platforms for building chatbots are:
I would like to extend an invitation to business leaders facing similar challenges to IoT Exchange in Sydney on 23-24 July 2019. It’s a great opportunity to engage in stimulating discussions with IBM staff, business partners and customers, and to network with your peers. You’ll participate in two full days of learning about new technologies through 40 information packed sessions. ...read more

There are NLP services and applications programming interfaces that are used to build the chatbots and make it possible for all type of businesses, small. Medium and large scale. The main point here is that Smart Bots have the potential to help increase your customer base by improving the customer support services and as a result boosts the sales as well as profits. They are an opportunity for many small and mid-sized companies to reach a huge customer base.

Training a chatbot happens at much faster and larger scale than you teach a human. Humans Customer Service Representatives are given manuals and have them read it and understand. While the Customer Support Chatbot is fed with thousands of conversation logs and from those logs, the chatbot is able to understand what type of question requires what type of answers.
Chatbots are often used online and in messaging apps, but are also now included in many operating systems as intelligent virtual assistants, such as Siri for Apple products and Cortana for Windows. Dedicated chatbot appliances are also becoming increasingly common, such as Amazon's Alexa. These chatbots can perform a wide variety of functions based on user commands.
Amazon’s Echo device has been a surprise hit, reaching over 3M units sold in less than 18 months. Although part of this success can be attributed to the massive awareness-building power of the Amazon.com homepage, the device receives positive reviews from customers and experts alike, and has even prompted Google to develop its own version of the same device, Google Home.

Chatbots can perform a range of simple transactions. Telegram bots let users transfer money, buy train tickets, book hotel rooms, and more. AI chatbots are especially sought-after in the retail industry. WholeFoods, a healthy food store chain in the US, uses a chatbot to help customers find the nearest store. The 1-800-Flowers chatbot lets customers order flowers and gifts. In the image below, you can see more ways you might use AI chatbots for your business.

Chatbots can direct customers to a live agent if the AI can’t settle the matter. This lets human agents focus their efforts on the heavy lifting. AI chatbots also increase employee productivity. Globe Telecom automated their customer service via Messenger and saw impressive results. The company increased employee productivity by 3.5 times. And their customer satisfaction increased by 22 percent.

What does the Echo have to do with conversational commerce? While the most common use of the device include playing music, making informational queries, and controlling home devices, Alexa (the device’s default addressable name) can also tap into Amazon’s full product catalog as well as your order history and intelligently carry out commands to buy stuff. You can re-order commonly ordered items, or even have Alexa walk you through some options in purchasing something you’ve never ordered before.

Chatfuel is one of the leading chatbot development platforms to develop chatbots for Facebook Messenger. One of the main reasons of Chatfuel’s popularity is easy to use interface. No knowledge of programming is required to create basic chatbot. People with non-technical background too can create bots using the platform and launch on their Facebook page.…
Of course, each messaging app has its own fine print for bots. For example, on Messenger a brand can send a message only if the user prompted the conversation, and if the user doesn't find value and opt to receive future notifications within those first 24 hours, there's no future communication. But to be honest, that's not enough to eradicate the threat of bad bots.
Human touch. Chatbots, providing an interface similar to human-to-human interaction, are more intuitive and so less difficult to use than a standard banking mobile application. They doesn't require any additional software installation and are more adaptive as able to be personalized during the exploitation by the means of machine learning. Chatbots are instant and so much faster that phone calls, shown to be considered as tedious in some studies. Then they satisfy both speed and personalization requirement while interacting with a bank.